by Amanda Painter
Portlanders and live music fans throughout southern Maine celebrated last weekend: the State Theater has reopened again. Why should you care if you live nowhere near here? To my mind, this is the sort of thing that signals a community has some of its values in order and is willing to work to make them tangible. If we’re lucky, that may be contagious.
The State Theater was built in 1929 in a semi-Atmospheric/Spanish Renaissance style. Its history is varied and for a while its future was uncertain — though its resurrection has been on the perennial wish list of Portland residents since its last shuttering in 2006. Beginning as a first-run movie cinema at the start of the movie palace hey-day, it reincarnated as a porn theater in the 1960s. In 1989 it closed and languished until its first restoration in the mid-1990s, closed again briefly, and then served as a mid-size music venue until 2006-07 when disagreements between property owners and venue operators over code violations left it boarded up again.
It’s the last movie palace of its era left in Portland, so its maintenance serves as both a functioning lifeline to cultural history as well as an important link in the community’s arts culture between home-grown musical acts and the national music scene.
I wasn’t able to attend the entire day-long open house last Sunday, which was part “welcome home,” part “thank you,” and part fundraiser for a local music non-profit. But I did manage to catch the last hour of big sounds, bright lights, familiar faces and dancing strangers. With my friend Ryan at the helm of the soundboard, I roamed around snapping photos to the practically apocalyptic soundtrack provided by Jacob and the House of Fire, a local band of about nine or so members (horns, violin and accordion?) whose motto is apparently “Love unconditionally and always question authority.” Exhorting the crowd between songs to wake up and pay attention to the moneyed string-pullers of this world, their primal, raucous set of ‘roots rock’ seemed aimed at stirring us up for a united revolution of love and truth — and unbridled music.